TravSUITE: Traversability via Self-Supervised, Uncertainty-Aware IRL and Terrain Estimation


Samuel Triest, Amirreza Shaban, David Fan, Wenshan Wang, Sebastian Scherer

Paper ID 70

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Abstract: Traversability analysis in off-road settings remains a fundamental challenge for mobile robots. Key difficulties include constructing an accurate, expressive local map from multi-modal sensor data and using the map to design traversability rules that yield desirable navigation behavior. Importantly, this system must be resilient to the limited sensing regime brought about by complex environments and high speeds. In this paper, we present TravSUITE, a traversability system suitable for high- speed navigation in off-road environments. TravSUITE consists of two major components: 1) a VFM-based voxel mapper that builds a rich geometric-semantic local map from streams of on-board sensor data, and 2) a unified neural network that jointly pre- dicts traversability-relevant quantities in bird’s eye view (BEV), including geometry, semantics, speed and cost. Our training strategy is entirely annotation-free and self-supervised, leveraging tasks such as map inpainting and inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) to learn both map representations and traversability. We also perform a thorough ablation study and comparison to state- of-the-art approaches, and the results indicate that cost learning and auxiliary inpainting each contribute significantly to planning quality, and their combination is critical for achieving state-of- the-art performance in path planning. We also design a simple risk adaptation mechanism to leverage our method’s uncertainty estimates at deploy-time, and demonstrate that a combination of inpainting and risk estimation can result in 80% fewer navigation errors and 5% faster autonomous traversal speeds in real-world hardware experiments.